Very new ideas for the old internet

Decrease in SERPs After Building Links

Webmaster forums are full of  “quick link building ban”  myths and novice webmasters are well afraid to push to the limits during their link building campaigns.

In fact the decrease in SERPs are true, but this is not any kind of  “banning”. Search engines, especially the big “G” use very complicated formulas to rank sites on the search results, considering many aspects.  This means that temporary de-indexing or sharp decrease in SERPs is perfectly normal if you’re putting in more than you already have.

Uh? What does that mean?

Well, think that you’re a kid being selected for a one of 10  basketball teams that are separated according to the average heights of the players. Team 1 has the tallest players and team 10 has the shortest. If your height do not change much over time and your height fits into the 7th team, then it’s easy for the coach to say “go train with the 7th team players”. But what if you gain 1 inch per day? Today you belong to the 7th team, tomorrow to the sixth and so on. The Coach is rather lazy and he does not want to deal with you everyday. So he puts you in a team where you’re surely over-qualified and waits until the increase in your height is in logical limits.  And finally he places you to the team where you actually belong.

The analogy may be stupid : ) but the fact is true. If your site has 1000 inbound links and you’re building 5 links per day that will probably won’t do any harm. But if your site has 300 inbound links and you’re building 100 links per day then prepare to get a decrease in SERPs.  Google waits until “incremental increase in links/total links” value to be logical until it re-ranks your site – probably to a much higher position.

The biggest evidence to this theory is that if the decrease was just about number of links created, then most of the giant sites would fluctuate in SERPs since they gain tons of inbound links every second. They don’t undergo a decrease in SERPs because the incremental increase is low enough compared to their overall link count.

We’re currently conducting an experiment on this. We’ve bought a  new domain and started a very aggressive link building campaign. Most of the 7th-8th page rankings suddenly dissappeared as the number of inbound links increased which is totally in accordance with our theory. We’ll be posting the proceedings of the experiment.

Please check back soon. Or better, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

Tags: decrease in SERPS, hazards of building links quickly, quick link building harm, seo

The Myth of Search Engine Optimization

There are only 10 spots in the top 10 spots. This might seem like a repetitive statement, but it is making a point. For companies to be selling the availability of 10 spots to thousands of companies makes for a mathematical anomaly that all the keyword buying in the world won’t be able to solve. The danger of all this madness is that, like with the original internet boom, the SEO (search engine optimization) boom will go bust as more and more companies get tired of spending money for results that somehow always seem to get replaced by excuses.
There are ways to naturally secure a reasonable position on search engines. They include:
Embed Keywords in Your Content – the placement of keywords (words you want your website to be categorized as and words you want the search engines to pick up on) in your page title and throughout your content will allow the search engine spiders to identify your site as you wish to be identified and place your site as part of searches for the words you select. The placement of the most critical keywords in the title tag will result in a higher search placement because the search engines place the title as the clickable link on the search engine results page. Once upon a time meta tags and meta keywords were used by search engines to evaluate content and search relevancy. This is not done anymore, partly because spammers abused it, and partly because the search engines could not figure out a way to monetize it (as they have with keyword purchases). The use of meta tags and keywords within your content is still helpful though in that they are often what is used in the description of your company on the search engine results page. By the way, make sure that while you are creating content that will be noticed by the search engines you don’t wind up creating content that is either incomprehensible or irrelevant to your readers. It makes no sense putting all this effort into getting people to visit your site if they can’t understand a word of what you’ve written once they get there.
Have a Proper Architecture – search engines cannot index pages that are more than two clicks away from your homepage, which is about the same distance the average web user is willing to travel to get at your information. It is therefore necessary to make certain that the structure of your website is constructed to maximize both search engine indexing and userability. In this case the two converge, so it is an easy condition to agree to execute.
Generate Link Relationships – to some extent, search engines rank according to some estimation of your site’s popularity. One of the parameters they use is how many other sites are linked to yours. So you need to develop affiliate and other relationships that link their website to yours. This too is consistent with general good web marketing, and therefore should not arouse too much resistance.
Search engine placement cannot come at the expense of your traditional and online marketing programs. It could, perhaps, be a component of your integrated plan, but you need to make certain it does not take over your other activities. The lure of the search engine – this idea that leads are generated by the lead itself – is very seductive, and the reason why so many companies have forsaken much of their other marketing activity for the full time management of their keyword purchasing and search engine optimization activities.
There have always been preferred places to advertise and there have always been preferred ways to generate leads – and often the only companies able to avail themselves of these top-tier opportunities were those with the financial resources to do so. Just as Time magazine has but one back cover to sell, Google has but 10 top spots for the keywords you want. If you have the means to purchase your place on that page, and you deem it to be a productive use of your marketing dollars, then you should do it. However, if you do not have the resources, and you are nonetheless spending money because some web marketing firm is promising you better placement, you are most likely throwing your good money away. Even with the pay-per-click model, which serves to reduce some of your risk, you are still paying for keyword purchase services and most likely other related services. Without spending real money you are either getting sub-par keywords or you are being placed well after the first three pages – and very few people bother searching after the third search engine results page.
If you don’t believe us, google it. You’ll see.

Tags: search engine optimization, seo

The role of the robots.txt file to improve site ranking!

Not many web master take the time to use a robots.txt file for their website. For search engine spiders that use the robots.txt to see what directories to search through, the robots.txt file can be very helpful in keeping the spiders indexing your actual pages and not other information, such as looking through your stats!

The robots.txt file is useful in keeping your spiders from accessing parts folders and files in your hosting directory that are totally unrelated to your actual web site content. You can choose to have the spiders kept out of areas that contain programming that search engines cannot parse properly, and to keep them out of the web stats portion of your site.

Many search engines cannot view dynamically generated content properly, mainly created by programming languages, such as PHP or ASP. If you have an online store programmed in your hosting account, and it is in a seperate directory, you would be wise to block out the spiders from this directory so it only finds relevant information.

The robots.txt file should be placed in the directory where your main files for your hosting are located. So you would be advised to create a blank text file, and save it as robots.txt, and then upload it to your web hosting to the same directory your index.htm file is located.

Here is examples of the use of the robots.txt file:

To block out a directory in a robots.txt file, such as a subdirectory for your online store called /store/ you would do the following: Disallow: /store/

Another example to block out your stats directory: Disallow: /stats/

You may also want to disallow individual files that you do not want searched by the search engines. For example you dont want search.php to be parsed by the Search Engines. To do this you type in the following on its own line:

Disallow: /search.php

Following the rules outlined and creating the robots.txt file, you will keep search engine spiders out of unwanted files and directories, and letting them go through the important files to see what your web site is all about!

Tags: higher rankings, robots.txt, search engine optimization, seo

Unethical SEO Practices to Avoid

SEO, or search engine optimization, is how search engines are used to maximize the chances of getting a high ranking.  As most Internet users know, you have to have a high ranking among the search engines if you want to get visitors.  Anyone who is searching for something online isn’t going to waste a lot of time by going through several pages of results before they give up and try a different search.  That second search may not even locate your web site, and your potential visitor becomes a lost visitor.

So, search engine optimization is used to boost page rankings with the search engines.  Search engines look for sites and rate them upon the number of the keywords searched appear within content on pages on the site.  They also look for lots of links.

The desire to have a high ranking with the search engines is great.  As everyone knows, you have to have a high ranking if you want to get visitors.  And let’s face it, the whole point of having a web site is to get visitors!  If you aren’t getting visitors, you aren’t improving business and you aren’t getting customers.  And your web site is totally worthless if no one is looking at it.  Search engine optimization becomes very, very important when you think about it and everything that it means.

Some may be so determined to get those high rankings that they do unethical things with their web sites in order to boost rankings.  These unethical practices are best avoided.  These practices can be changed, these unethical motives turned into ethical ones, and you can boost your site’s rankings the way you’re supposed to.  First, identify the wrong things that you might be doing.

-    Using your keywords improperly
Search engines are very clever, but they aren’t so smart that they can’t be tricked.  Search engines do search sites for content, but they can’t exactly read the content the way that human beings can.  Some web sites bury their keywords around a bunch of other words, in text that has no form and makes no sense.  Long strings of text with random words like “boating fishing hunting outdoor adventure fish boat hunting the great outdoors forestry fishing rock climbing boating water onboard Alaska” come up all the time.  Search engines may only be looking for the words “fish” and “fishing” and since those keywords appear within what seems to be content, a false ranking is given.  But don’t do this!  Customers don’t like this, and in the end “tricking” a search engine is never a good idea.  Your keywords should appear within real content on your web site.  Then you will get a genuinely high ranking.

-    Improper use of META tags
META tags are part of the html code that is used to create a web page.  The META tags are what you use to tell search engines what keywords are on your web site, what keywords you want potential visitors to use when searching for your piece of the Internet.  Some may use META tags to try and “trick” search engines in a similar way as described above.  This won’t work long, however, and search engines do not look by META tags alone.  Search engines always search content.

-    Having false content
“False” content are long strings of text that make no sense, that are only on the site to make use of keywords for search engines.  While it’s important to impress the search engines and get that high ranking that’s so valuable, it’s more important to impress your visitors.  Visitors like great content, too, and they’re going to be put off by a bunch of text that doesn’t make sense and isn’t a good read.  While it’s true that most of the content on web sites is only skimmed over briefly by viewers, you still want that content to make a little bit of sense to them.  Have good content, at least real content, and make the most out of your keywords using that content.  That’s how to get a truly high ranking with a search engine, ethically.

Tags: keywords, Meta Tags, page ranking, search engine optimization, seo

Why ? – Meta Tags used

This article covers the most important aspects of Meta tags in relation to website optimization or SEO.

What are Meta tags?

Meta Tags are the information inserted in the area of the HTML code of your web pages, where apart from the Title Tag, other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page but is intended for the search engine crawlers. Meta Tags are included so that the search engines are able to list your site in their indexes more accurately.

What can I include in a Meta tag?

There are basically four major Meta tags that you can use:

* Open tag META name=”resource-type” content=”document” Closed tag

o The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.

* Open tag META name=”description” content=”a description of your page” Closed tag

o Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. “Content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don’t be so mean with your description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!

* Open tag META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of,keywords” Closed tag

o Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas. Remember to include synoyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.

* Open tag META name=”distribution” content=”one of several” Closed tag

o Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). To be perfectly honest, I can’t quite get my head around this one; its supposed to list available resources designed to allow the use to find things easily, but I still don’t quite get it. My advice is to stick to “global”.

Using Meta Tags in HTML is not necessary while making your web pages. There are many websites that don’t feel the requirement to use Meta Tags at all. In short Meta information is used to communicate information to the search engine crawlers that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Infoseek and AltaVista were the first major crawler based search engines to support Meta keywords Tag in 1996. Inktomi and Lycos too followed thereafter.

Why are Meta Tags used? – Want to get a top ranking in search engines

Meta Tags were originally designed to provide webmasters with a way to help search engines know what their site was about. This in turn helped the search engines decide how to rank the sites in their search results. Making Meta Tags is a simple process. As the competition increased, webmasters started manipulating this tool through spamming of keywords. In turn most search engines withdrew their support to Meta keywords Tag, which included Lycos and AltaVista. From being considered as one of the most reliable and important tool, Meta Tags are now often abused. In the present day scenario a vital feature that the Meta Tags provide to the websites is the ability to control, to a certain extent, how some search engines describe its web pages. Apart from this, Meta Tags also offer the ability to specify that a certain website page should not be indexed.

Using Meta Tags, however, provides no guarantee that your website page would rank highly in the search engine rankings. Due to the rampant abuse and manipulation of the Meta keywords Tag by webmasters, most search engines don’t support it anymore.

Tags: Meta tag optimization, Meta Tags, seo, seo techniques

Write for Humans, Design for Search Engines

Search engine is all about content and every SEO gurus have been trying very hard to optimize their pages just for the search engine and often forgetting that the end user is actually the human reader. It is of paramount importance that a page has to be written for humans and designed for search engines in terms of SEO.

There is nothing more important than creating unique content for a site. In SEO, allocating keywords in the title, header and bold HTML tags not only helps the reader to identify the topic of a page easily but it also aids in optimization since search engine takes into consideration of the keywords in these tags.

Many writers are concerned about the perfect keyword density for the maximum benefit of SEO. Unfortunately, there are no hard figures for a perfect keyword percentage. The most important factor when creating content is to make it readable and unique. As long as the content is readable, there is no need to follow a set percentage of keyword density.

Designing a page to facilitate the indexing by the search engine bots is another important factor to consider next to content creation. A page with rich content without indexed by the search engine bots is equivalent to no content at all. To help the search engines to find the page, the navigation system and sitemap plays important roles here. It is advisable to have text links navigation so that bots can spider all the internal pages smoothly. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash made navigation system because most bots will ignore them but designer can always include a set of text links at the bottom of the page where these kinds of navigation system are used to overcome this issue.

Some search engines place great emphasis on the content near the top of a page. Therefore, it is advisable to design the layout in such a way that the content appears before other parts of the page. One example is to use the content first CSS template; it allows the navigation to appear on the left of a page followed by the content but the content is the first to appear in the codes. This method helps search engine bots to identify the important content of a page and index them since they are placed near the top of a page. Another easy work around is to employ a right side navigation menu.

The ultimate purpose of SEO is to make sure that the designated content appears in search engine according to the specific searches. Making the content readable and designing the page for easy indexing should always be the first priority for webmasters when SEO comes into play.

Thank you.

Tags: easy indexing, original content, readable content, search engine optimization, seo

Why You Should Optimize Your Website Content

Optimizing a website’s content, in order to obtain a high search engine ranking is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about. Nowadays the term SEO has become more familiar to people around the globe. If you want your website to be picked up by prominent search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, you will have to make use of today’s SEO techniques.

SEO techniques play an important role in improving the visibility of your website in search engine listings. Search Engine Optimization is defined as the process of making the contents of the website relevant for both users and search engines. In other words it’s the method of attracting search engine spiders to crawl over your website to increase its ranking for specific keywords.

To elaborate – for people to find a site through a search engine, the site requires a high SERP (Search Engine Results Position) as people rarely go to the second page of the search results. This means that when a user searches with relevant keywords or phrases, they should be able to find your website page listed on the first page of the search results. What is important in respect to search engine optimization is getting a high SERP.  Many different SEO techniques are used by SEO companies to get high Search Engine Result Position.

Today people using the search engine optimization technique as an effective method for increasing the relevance of a particular website. Search Engine optimization is a hyper – competitive tactic which requires acute focus and an exhaustive understanding about the search engine algorithms and how the robots operate.

The commonly accepted technique in SEO is the method of including unique phrases into the content of websites and thereby making sure the content is indexed by search engine robots. This can be done by inputting articles or other writings in the website containing your target keyword phrases for which you want your site to achieve high search engine rankings. This method is commonly accepted as the secure and cost effective method of increasing the traffic of the website.

SEO techniques like spamdexing and black hat SEO will harm the search engine experience of the user. Using these techniques may lead to your website being banned by search engines and should be avoided.

Another important method for increasing web traffic is to code the content of the web page with meta tags to optimize the keyword. This will enable search engines to index the web pages easily. Many other factors such as the architecture, structure, pagerank and design of the web page also contribute to your website’s successful ranking.

What is the business benefit you gain by optimizing your website using effective SEO techniques? The answer is very simple free targeted traffic. And targeted traffic means better conversion ratios and higher ROI for your business.

Tags: content optimization, search engine optimization, seo, website optimization

Great free opportunity for website traffic increase

You got your website done and it’s up. But no visitors even if you have the nicest website possible and you spent a lot of money to have it done as you wanted. Everything is in place …your website can be seen in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You also paid an internet advertising campaign, told all your mates about your website, but still got only few visitors and other sites related to your business are placed much better in search results. Why? Your website is much better and nice looking than others but they still got a lot of visitors every day and their business is growing, company gets a lot of money and they are all very pleased. If you encountered all these problems, here is the right place where you may find answers to solve your problems.

If you didn’t hear about SEO, or you heard but you don’t know anything about it let me start telling you that SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Is there such thing? …you may ask. Yes, and that’s why other websites are better placed in search engines than your website.

There are many rumors about the search engines and their algorithm which make the calculations for website positioning in the search results, but no one knows for sure the importance (in percentage) for every optimization you do. One thing is for sure: Google and other search engines are looking for your importance and fame in the internet. So, if your website name and link for it doesn’t appear in other websites it means that you have a very low fame and you’ll be given a rank 0 from maximum 10. Ok, maybe you’re right, but how can I have links to my website in other websites? I don’t know anybody who has a website to ask him (if it likes) to have my link in his webpage. Or it may cost a lot of money. There is an answer for this. You can do it free and can have thousands of links to your page in only few days. How? Submitting your website to Web Directories and Article Directories. There are thousands of  directories in the internet and also a lot of tools for submitting your website automatically. Write an article about your business and submit it in the article directories and don’t forget to mention your website there.

Tags: article submission, Internet Marketing, seo, Website Promotion, website traffic increase

Google Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices – Part 5

The fifth and last part of this article will concentrate on the internal and analysis areas of the optimization for Google. I will review 3 essential areas. Let’s start:

Why do you need to use Google Sitemaps.
If your site has hundreds of pages, then a compressed version of the file can be created. You are required to create an account with Google in order to take advantage of this feature. Two things to consider before uploading the sitemap file are to verify that your robots.txt allows Google to craw the site for this to work in the first place, and that you check for 404 error pages in your site. Now to why you need this: Google will crawl your site more frequently to verify changes in the sitemap file, and index files that normally it wouldn’t. So keep it up to date with your weekly changes. It saves Google time, since it will only concentrate on updated content, and getting new or updated pages indexed as a benefit.

The importance of Web Analytics.
Keep track of your optimization and log results by understanding your analytics. It is essential that you monitor your visitor paths and exit pages. Make all necessary changes through your pages to make sure you are improving those pages that are top exit ones. One way to achieve this is by creating stronger offerings, guarantees, and calls to action among other things. SiteCatalyst is a very robust solution with a lot of features. SiteCatalyst provides data related to navigation, ecommerce, content, and other detailed visitor information. It also has a pretty flexible dashboard and it is very data intensive. One of the great features that it provides is comparison, which allows you to compare different campaigns and groups to see how they are doing so against each other, so that campaigns can be optimized. If you are looking robust features such as customizable dashboards, then Omniture SiteCatalyst might be right for you.

Staying out of the Supplemental Index.
Sites of any age, size, and rank can end up in the supplemental index. For the first 2 factors, it is related to the update ratio or duplicate content. For the last one, because of missing elements. The number one reason to be listed in this index is the update ratio. So how do you fix this? Update the content of the page. Change the body content mostly. Title changes and Heading tags also helps. Number two reason is that the page is no longer internally linked from home or main category pages. So, the fix? Self explanatory. Last reason, your site is online but less than six months old. If this is your case, please read my 2 part article on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics” were you will be able to find out what to do to get out much quicker.

Closing Statement about Google Optimization.
To recap… Make sure that your site is compliant, stays true, stays natural, and stays organic. Focus on content, and bringing quality traffic to your site. If people are attracted to your site and buy, Google will be attracted to the site too and the site will naturally rank well. Make it easy on Google, and they will make it easy on you.

Tags: search engine optimization blog, search engine optimization firm, seo, seo firm, seo pros

The Three Basic Keys of Search Engine Optimisation

With search engine optimisation on the rise, there are many mind blowing theories that are circulating about what will get you high up in the search engines. From having your keywords in bold font, to having your text as close to the top of a page, along with the famous 3% – 7% keyword density rule, we can scrap them all since it comes down to three basic key points.

1. Keyword Selection

The most important point out of the three is keyword selection. If you end up selecting keywords that do not have any/few searches, then you are simply wasting time by optimising for them. There is no point in being ranked number one for a keyword when there are no searchers for that term. A good place to start is by using keyword research tools such as “Wordtracker”, “Overture Keyword Assistant” and “Keyword Discovery”, to find out what people are typing into search engines. Once you have found those terms, the next step is to work out the level of competition and effort it will take to get a reasonable rank for each term. The best way is to look at the number of competing pages in search engines for each keyword and how many incoming links the top ten websites have (“Marketleap link popularity checker” is a good tool for that). If you have the knowledge and time, you may want to go for the slightly more competitive keywords.

2. Good On-the-Page and Off-the-Page Structure

For on-the-page factors, making sure that there is a sufficient amount of text based content, title tags and a strong internal linking between all web pages, is a good start. Title tags and content should contain keywords provided that they are not “stuffed” into the text. For example, if your keyword is “dog supplies”, this sort of writing should be avoided:

“We base our business on dog supplies and have a great range of dog supplies. Check out our latest dog supplies today!”

A visitor will be immediately turned off from this sort of writing and will question the credibility of your site. Keywords should be written around the content, not the other way around.

Off-the-page factors relates to reducing code within your web pages (placing code into external files, such as JavaScript and Style Sheets) and having a website design where search engines can index all your content.

3. Incoming Links

Attaining incoming links to your website has become a more heavily relied upon factor in last couple of years. Each incoming link is seen by search engines as a vouch from another site. The more incoming relevant links you have, the more trusted your website becomes by search engines. This does not mean you can simply acquire a bunch of links from any site. Links need to relevant in the sense that the website linking to you has some sort of affiliation with your theme otherwise the links will not benefit you.

Provided you stick to the three basic key points of search engine optimisation, in time you will notice a stronger website presence in the search engines. Whist it can be done on your own if you have the knowledge and time, hiring an SEO agency is one avenue to success if you have the budget. Having said that, time should not be spared in taking advantage of the vast opportunities the internet can bring you and your business.

Tags: Improve Search Engine Placement, search engine optimisation, seo, SEO News, SEO Sydney, SEO Tips